Marx Matters in a Deeply Unequal World in Crisis
“Marx once said that ‘the rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.’ This remains true in today’s world.”
By Jon Trickett MP
Idly overhearing a conversation about class and economics between two Labour people in Parliament the other day I got to thinking about whether Marx is still relevant. One of the two people said something like “Oh, he’s an old fashioned socialist. Thinks that Karl Marx remains relevant to what’s happening in the world today.”
I think they were talking about the American politician Bernie Sanders. Of course, Karl Marx may have lived in the 19th century, and the world has self-evidently changed a great deal over time. But his analysis of the economic structures of capitalist economies often feel as if they were written yesterday.
He didn’t live to witness the rise of tech billionaires, global financial derivatives, or FTSE-100 CEOs earning in a day what most workers earn in a year – but he didn’t need to. He understood capitalism’s structures: its ruthless logic of accumulation, its division of society into classes, and its tendency to generate enormous wealth for a few alongside hardship for the many.
Marx once said that “the rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.” This remains true in today’s world. We live in a time when the five richest men on Earth have more than doubled their wealth since 2020 – rising from $405 billion to $869 billion – while nearly five billion people have seen their wealth decline. That’s not just unfair. It’s the global system doing exactly what Marx said it would do.
In Britain, nearly a third of all children – about 4.3 million – live in poverty. Globally, 333 million children are trapped in extreme poverty, and nearly a billion face multidimensional poverty: no basic access to clean water, food or education. This isn’t misfortune. It is the result of global economic policy – a system of exploitation that Marx would recognise all too well.
Marx argued that capitalist societies are divided by class: those who own and control the means of production and those who do not. That fundamental divide hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s become more obvious. Today, seven out of the ten largest corporations in the world are run by billionaires. These corporations control $10.2 trillion – more than the combined GDPs of all countries in Africa and Latin America.
In Britain, the top 50 families own more than the wealth of 34 million citizens combined. Meanwhile, the average salary is around £37,500 – a sum a FTSE CEO earns in less than 30 hours. In the face of such glaring inequality, even the mildest proposals for a wealth tax are met with fierce resistance by some of those with the most to lose.
And what about our tax system? It taxes income from work more heavily than income from capital. In other words, someone who works a 40-hour week pays a higher tax rate than someone who earns millions off dividends and shares. This isn’t an accident. It reflects Marx’s understanding of the modern state as an instrument of bourgeois class rule – the machinery of government defends the interests of capital over labour.
In the current cost of living crisis, millions of working class people are struggling to get by. As rent, energy bills, and food prices soar, we can see the world through Marx’s eyes. He couldn’t foresee every detail of today’s highly financialised tech capitalism, but he didn’t need to for his work to remain relevant. His analysis gives us a powerful lens to understand why, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, children go hungry while billionaires multiply.
Perhaps the most relevant part of his critique of capitalist economics was his view of its dynamics. We can all perhaps agree that extreme inequality is unwelcome.
But Marx proposes that the extreme wealth of some comes at the expense of the poverty of others: the ‘accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time the accumulation of misery, agony of toil ….at the opposite pole.’
The Left’s call for a more equal society and an economy that serves the many and not just the few, are not relics of the past. They are urgent demands rooted in an understanding that, in a capitalist system, inequality is not a temporary imperfection. It’s a permanent feature.
Marx’s legacy isn’t just in what he got right. It’s also in how he challenged us to ask who owns our world, who profits, and who pays the price. That challenge remains as relevant now as it was 150 years ago.
- Jon Trickett is the Member of Parliament for Hemsworth: you can follow him on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok.
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